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Facebook has a fake news problem. Google has an evil unicorn problem.
"Evil unicorns" — a term some Google engineers once coined, according to a former executive — are unverified posts on obscure topics, full of lies. They pop up from time to time on the web and find their way into Google's search results. In an ideal world, Google's search algorithm should force these fake, pernicious creatures so low in search results that they are buried deep in the web where few can find them.
Here's the problem: These unicorns — no, they've got nothing to do with highly valued startups — are designed to surface in a void. And after a breaking news event, like a mass shooting, there's scant verified information for Google's engine to promote. As Jonathan Swift once wrote, falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
[...] After the Oct. 1 Las Vegas shooting, several accounts seemed to coordinate an effort to smear Geary Danley, a man misidentified as the shooter, with false claims about his political ties. There were no existing web pages or videos broadcasting that Danley was innocent, and in the absence of verified information, Google's algorithms rewarded the lies, placing inaccurate tweets, videos and posts at the top of search results. A month later, when Devin Patrick Kelley shot and killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas, YouTube videos and tweets mislabeled him as "antifa," a term for radical, anti-fascist protesters. This was not true, yet Google displayed these posts prominently.
[...] This is a familiar headache for the company. For years, Google fought and won a similar battle with spammers, content farms and so-called search engine optimization experts over which web pages should be shown at the top of search results. But these latest web manipulators are causing greater havoc by targeting a slightly different part of Google — its real-time news and video results.
Source: Inside Google's Struggle to Filter Lies from Breaking News
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @11:13AM
Are you absolutely sure about this? The story I heard was that the one of the Black Panthers who defected to Cuba, ran into a KGB agent at some function. So he asked him: "I always heard that you guys were supporting us with finances, at least that is what the right wing is always saying. But I never could trace any of our funding to you. But you did support us?" The KGB agent smiled, and said: "It is alright. We send money to the KKK, too! The entire point was just to destabilize the United States. I would not be surprised if Alex Jones is a russian front wacko. And then there is Runaway: Too deep into the cover to even ever to realize that is it just a cover. Come home, runaway. the island in the big river. We will eat mud together. And take away all our Soros gold, and Beck's phoney baloney hyping of something that. . . Wait a minute.